


Mrs. Jackson

by Darkmagyk



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Angst, F/M, Introspection, Missing Scene, Post-The Battle of the Labyrinth, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:08:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23175976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkmagyk/pseuds/Darkmagyk
Summary: Annabeth daydreams about things that can’t be.Set between Battle of the Labyrinth and The Last Olympian. Annabeth is at school in San Fransisco, and has a lot of feelings, mostly about Percy.
Relationships: Annabeth Chase/Percy Jackson, Luke Castellan & Annabeth Chase
Comments: 9
Kudos: 148





	Mrs. Jackson

**Author's Note:**

> This just sort of popped into my head, and kind of got away from me when I was trying to work on other things. I'm not even sure I like it, but I wrote so I'm posting it.

No one ever noticed that cows. But they always noticed the smell when she stepped in the pie. Annabeth wanted to scream, but as she was in the third flood girls bathroom, trying to wash it off of her school shoes, she settled for just muttering all the worst curses she knew in ancient Greek. She’d been at camp a long time, she knew a lot. 

She probably shouldn’t have gone out of her way to antagonize the queen of the gods. But Annabeth was a demigod, even if she wasn’t impulsive and antagonistic, her existence pissed the lady off. Even if Athena had the since not to have a husband to cheat on. 

It did not bode well if Annabeth ever wanted to get married, what curses Hera might call down on her. 

But she’d have to have a love life, first, and Aphrodite wasn’t doing her any favors in that department. 

_The hero's soul, cursed blade shall reap._ There was no romance to be found in that, time was almost up. She wouldn’t think about him. He wasn’t worth it. He liked that mortal girl, and he was basically a dead man walking. 

(The hole in her chest, when she thought about him being gone too, might be worse than the hole that Luke had left when he’d run off to be evil. And Percy wasn’t even dead, yet.)

She put her shoe back on and washed her hands so forcefully that she got water down the front of her shirt.

Stupid water. Stupid boys. Stupid Hera. Stupid school. 

She slipped into English class after the bell, and her teacher glared at her. 

Teachers didn’t like Annabeth. And it wasn’t like it was a secret why. She made good grades but a terrible student. Half the time she didn’t pay attention, and the other time she paid too much, blurting out questions before she could stop herself. And that was if she didn’t get distracted by monsters and magic that needed her attention elsewhere. 

This time, at least, her dad had found her a school where her frequent absences wouldn’t result in an automatic failure. 

Annabeth hadn’t ever gotten kicked out of school, but first and seventh grade had both been close calls, and she’d only not gotten suspended in eighth because Thalia was so good at manipulating the mist. Camp had prepared her for many things: advanced math, architecture, killing creatures from greek mythology, but it had not really helped with things like sitting still in a classroom for eight hours, giving your attention to a single person, or reading English. 

Her teacher was probably talking about something important, and Annabeth kept her eyes on the front of the room, and the projector she was writing on. But the dry erase letters were shifting in front of her. She could normally figure things out if they were printed out and in high contrast, but this was pretty hopeless at the moment. 

Still, she tried to keep up appearances. She had her notebook open and her pen out, let it move across the paper in every which way. She’d sketched out a colosseum in no time. 

Her dad had been talking about taking her to Greece this summer, to Athens, her mother’s city, to see the Parthenon. But he’d also said they could consider Rome too. 

Something about the idea of Rome had felt off to her, but as she looked at her little sketch, she reconsidered. 

Rome, something was there for her. 

She tried to follow that thought, physically lifting her head and turning too look out of the window. The Berkeley Hills across the bay were pretty in the late morning. 

(Something dangerous lurked there, and it was not Mount Othrys.) 

She blinked and saw something fiery burning behind her closed eyes. Something in Rome. 

Then someone flipped on the classroom light, and she blinked again, against the change in light. 

Whatever that stray thought had been, it was gone in a second. 

She couldn’t go to Greece _or_ Rome this Summer. 

Because the world was ending, and Percy Jackson was going to die. 

She hated herself for thinking his name. She normally tried too hard to avoid it when it didn’t matter. Just the thought of him made her heart rate speed up

She took a deep breath. She was a warrior, she could control her body. And she was a daughter of Athena. She could control her mind, too. 

She redoubled her efforts, and mostly caught the rest of her teacher's lecture. Something about _The Most Dangerous Game_. She’d read it later, but she knew anyone who wrote that wasn’t a demigod, they’d have known the answer was the Teumessian Fox.

(Or maybe ancient titans who stole your love’s body.) 

She’d never actually been hunting, unless you counted for monsters on quests. She remembered before she’d dropped out of elementary school, some of her classmates in Virginia had gone, and she’d seen the Hunters of Artemis at work, of course. 

Maybe she could go along with Thalia, sometime when, if, everything calmed down. 

But then, if she went with Thalia, she might not be able to do it with Percy, and the idea of a camping trip without Percy made her feel sad. 

When she was little, she’d camped with Luke and Thalia, but now, she camped on quests, and she went on those with Percy. 

She’d hardly heard from him at all this year. The sting of last Summer still fresh in both of their minds, she’s sure. 

(She knew she let both Luke and Percy down. And that double failure kept her away. It probably would have even without a continent between them.)

She’d gotten an email from him the other day though, to confirm that his mom had gotten married, and to share a few of the pictures of the wedding. His email had been so chatty and friendly. Fully of comfortable misspellings that she either didn’t notice or had to get her dad to help translate. 

He’d looked nice in his suit, and given how he looked standing next to his mom, he might be taller than her, now. She wasn’t sure if she liked the thought of that or not. 

_But I’m supposed to tell everyone that she’s still Sally Jackson. Though I’d have been in favor of all of us becoming Blowfish._

She’d smiled when she’d read it, and she smiled thinking about it now. 

Sally Jackson.

She really couldn’t be anyone else.

And Jackson was a good last name. Straight forward. But with some character.

Chase had always struck her as straight forward in the boring way. Like the designs of terrible McMansions that had dotted their old Virginia Suburb. They fit all the definitions of a house: roof, walls, kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms. But there was nothing homey about it. 

Even her dad hadn’t liked it. His family, she knew, was mostly Swedish, but the Chase name came from like one paternal great grandfather. Annabeth’s grandparents were all dead, (unless you counted Zeus, even Athena’s mother was gone) so she’d never met them (unless you counted being in the room where Zeus debated whether or not to kill her two best friends in the entire world as meeting your grandfather). But she knew just enough to know that they’d been attached enough to their Scandinavian roots to be annoyed with her dad when he’d focused his undergraduate history research on World War II. 

She’d certainly never gotten the full history of the last name Jackson, but she knew that Sally liked it enough to keep it twice. 

Annabeth respected that. Why mess with a good thing. 

Jackson, she wrote out on her notebook, barely sparing her teacher a thought, making sure whatever was being said couldn’t be picked up another way. 

Annabeth she wrote, in fluid, loopy letters. She’d developed a signature at nine after a Hermes’s Cabin member had given her an impromptu lecture about check fraud, in a fit of paranoia. She was very pleased with the craftsmanship of it all. 

_Annabeth Jackson_.

It didn’t look quite right, she was so used to writing Annabeth, but she didn’t get Jackson down. 

She wrote it again and again. 

Annabeth Jackson. 

Annabeth Jackson.

Annabeth Jackson.

She hit her stride at about number 17, when the dismissal bell was ringing, Jackson coming out as fluidly as Annabeth. 

Annabeth Jackson. 

She liked it. 

(He was as good as dead.)

She closed her notebook. Her next class was Latin. She was better at that, could normally get a hold of it. She’d done some study of it at camp as part of her research. It felt a little traitorous on her tongue, the Greeks did it first and better, but with all her continued trouble reading English, she hadn’t wanted to attempt Spanish or French or Chinese. 

She sat to the left, away from the bright window and the distractions of the outside world and went about arranging her desk to at least look productive.

One of her small handful of school friends, (separate from her real friends, her camp friends) Jane, sat to her left, not so surreptitiously trying to get a glance at her work the day before. 

Annabeth wasn’t actually opposed to a little sharing, but the chances that her dyslexia made one of her wrong answers easily identifiable on other people’s pages meant that she didn’t let people copy off of her. 

She was about to move her open notebook out of Jane’s line of sight, when she heard the other girl burst into a bunch of giggles. 

“Who,” Jane asked, “is Annabeth _Jackson_?”

Annabeth felt blood rush to her face. She glanced down and yes, on the opposite side of her homework was her penmanship practice.

“It's nothing,” Annabeth said, quickly turning the page. But Jane just giggled more. 

“Do you have a boyfriend? How come you haven't said anything?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” That was unassailable truth. “Its really just nothing, stupid.”

“So it's just a crush, for now?” Jane’s grin was wicked. Like an Aphrodite girl’s, but without any of the eerie power backing it. “It's Dominic, isn’t it?”

“I have no idea who that is.” 

“Dominic Jackson,” at Annabeth’s blank look, Jane sighed, “star of the lacrosse team? You really don’t know him, do you. That’s a shame, having a crush on him would have been too normal for you.” 

Something about that stung deep. Annabeth wasn’t normal, and she’d never really minded that, barring those years when her step-mother had been unable to deal with the demands of a demigod child, and her father hadn’t known what to do in the middle of it. She was a daughter of Athena. She was wise and clever and built for battle. She was an heir to great history and a great tradition. 

But Jane definitely saw it as a bad thing. 

(This was why she had school friends and real friends. No one at Camp Half Blood was normal. And some of them might see it like it was a bad thing too, but at least they’d understood.)

Jane just moved onto guessing celebrities. Several of which Annabeth had never heard of, and at least one of whom she knew was a son of Athena. 

The bell rang and Jane stopped. Annabeth tried very hard to pay attention and ignore the page of signatures resting several sheets down, under her palm. 

Latin could take her attention, and she was better at getting her homework done in school then out of it. 

Jane wasn’t in any of her other classes, and something had distracted her between Latin and lunch, so she didn’t gossip about Annabeth’s doodles to the rest of her school friends. 

Calling Annabeth’s feelings for Percy a crush seemed so- silly. People had crushes on popular boys they didn’t know and celebrities they’d never meet. 

Annabeth _knew_ Percy. She knew his favorite food and his shoe size, where he went when he skipped out on archery practice and his favorite hiding spots at camp, she knew where he’d be in battle, and that she could always always count on him. 

She knew how he looked battled and bloody and how he looked standing on the deck of a ship cool and calm and completely in control. 

He’s her best friend except for maybe Thalia. 

She doesn’t have a crush on him. She had feelings about him and for him and every which way in relation to him. 

But she doesn’t have a crush. She hadn’t had a crush on him for at least a year, maybe two. 

(He’s dying this summer. All the feelings in all the world can’t stop that. She’s read all the stories, heroes can’t outrun their fate. Not even the greatest of them. And she knows Percy is one of the greats.)

She tries no to let her mind wander that way for the rest of the day. It works, but only because they were pouring over maps in geography. 

Her dad had had a globe when she was little, where he pointed out Athens and Boston and how they were moving to Virginia. He’d also had pages upon pages of battlefield maps and sometimes he’d explain troop movements and strategies. They were bright happy memories in a childhood that often seems so dark. 

But she mostly remembered being seven and leaning into Luke’s side around a campfire as he discussed their movements, how to read them and think in terms of actual people and the distances they travelled, and not just her dad’s little toy soldiers. 

She didn’t want to think about Luke any more than she wanted to think about Percy. She’d spent most of the year so far half hoping he’d show up this year too. But she knew it was impossible. His body was with Kronos, he wouldn’t be able to escape again, he’d told her that last year. 

If she had just gone with him, maybe. Or if she’d considered the ramifications of the prophecy more fully. Surely she could have done something to help him. 

Maybe she still can.

He’d been distracted by a plastic hairbrush. That didn’t seem very Titan-y, but it certainly would have gotten Luke’s attention. Back when they first got to camp, sometime Annabeth would have to throw things at him to get his attention again.

Kronos might have his body, but Luke is in there, somehow. 

She’s scoured all the texts she knows, she doesn’t know how she’s going to get him out. But Athena always has a plan. Annabeth will too. 

He taught her how to think about maps, it is the very very least she can do. 

(He trapped her under the weight of the sky. He tried to kill her on the Princess Andromeda. He poisoned Thalia’s tree. He keeps trying to kill Percy.)

(She never practiced writing out Annabeth Castellan.) 

She thought about it all the way home, too. She’d been through all the Greek texts, but maybe there are some Latin ones she doesn't know. Her Latin teacher once mentioned a little bookstore in Oakland, not too far from the Caldecott tunnel with good selection of Latin books, for anyone who wanted to explore a little deeper. 

The Roman’s might have been copycats, but they had the same gods, and they had demigods too. 

She got home to an empty house, because her step mom was still at work and her dad was probably picking up the boys. It was better that way, she didn’t want anyone to ask her how her day had been. She just slipped up to her room and pulled out her Latin, reviewing her most recent notes and trying to come up with some things to ask about at the bookstore when she got the chance to go. 

(The Romans had had their own prophecies, maybe they had someone who escaped his fate.) 

She used the excuse of her new idea to actually get some of her Latin homework done at home, but it did mean that she had no mental energy left to buckle down and try to read for English. 

Instead she flipped back through the rest of her notebook, trying to glean something about the assignment that would be interesting. 

She didn’t make it that far, because in between English and Latin, on an opposite page, written seventeen times in blue ink, was the name Annabeth Jackson. 

It made her giddy to read, then blush, then want to crumple it up and die. 

She was fully prepared to do the last thing when she caught one of the pictures hanging on the wall, next too her desk. She’d put four up: One of her and Luke and Thalia from the good old days that felt like betrayal but she couldn’t bare to take down. One of her and her Dad, just a few weeks after she’d joined them in San Francisco, where she and her dad both look kind of baffled by how happy they are to be together. One from when she was very very young, before they’d even left Boston. She and her dad and her Aunt Natalie and Uncle Randolph and her cousin Magnus, who was little more than a baby. She hadn’t seen any of them in a decade, before she’d even run away and there weren’t any other pictures of them in the house, but her dad had asked if she wanted to hang it in her room with a kind of sad desperation and she’d agreed. 

But the last picture really caught her eye. It had been taken almost two years ago now, by Malcom, maybe, or Selina. She and Percy together on the dock at the canoe lake. 

She ripped out the paper, but she was neat about it, cleaned off the edge. And then she put pen to paper again, not covering the elegant loopy lines, but using them for- something. 

She wasn’t sure what it was until she was two thirds of the way there, a building of course, a palace maybe, or a hotel. Something with an Ancient Greek flavor, but a different feel, less stuffy and more free and open. It was in blue ink, but she could see it in colors in her mind. 

Maybe it was that temple she always bugged Chiron about wanting to build on Camp Half-Blood. 

Something that could be real and permanent, a place for all the half-bloods who felt lost and abandoned to go and connect with their parents. 

Designed and colored around her name seventeen times. 

She smiled at it, and then slid it into one of her desk draws, where she tried to keep her other designs when she was able to be organized. 

It felt like hope. 

(Her bookshelves were full of Greek heroes who tried to cheat fate and suffered worse. They were full of heroines who’s ill fated run-ins with love, with heroes, ended in heartbreak and war and pain and death. Percy Jackson was going to die this summer. Annabeth was in love with him anyway.)

**Author's Note:**

> Check me out on [tumblr](http://darkmagyk.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Fun fact: in real life, I find the practice of women taking their husband's names deeply suspicious and kind of upsetting. But I cannot see a world where Annabeth doesn't.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [something she won't speak of](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23729911) by [thcrivalryendsehere (AzaWhite)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AzaWhite/pseuds/thcrivalryendsehere)




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